The second album by the Belgium band continues traditions of the debut album “The Long Now” being, however, more conceptual. Interlaced guitar passages create an inimitable atmosphere typical for post rock while sludge metal riffs do not allow to monotony to dominate. Episodic appearance of bugle and trumpet ensure new sound which is not common for post metal. The album is addressed to fans of Isis, Cult Of Luna, Mouth Of The Architect, Rosetta.

Can doom metal ever escape its self-imposed exile into the wastelands of mediocrity and disdain for anything accessible? A new wave of bands who step out just a bit beyond the confines of Doom are saying an emphatic “Yes.”

Grown Below released their first album The Long Now in 2011 to rave reviews by metal fans. Mixing traditional doom with ambient and atmospheric interludes including chilling violin and female vocals, the band created a traditional, yet nuanced sound. With that release, Grown Below announced to the world that sludge and doom could be legitimate forms of musicianship.

With The Other Sight, Matthijs Vanstaen, Lennart Vanstaen, Johan Heyrman and Jolan Chen have further evolved their sound in a way that should appeal to current fans while making their music available to metal fans who desire a little more energy.

This is a very different album than the band’s first. Gone are the violins and female vocals. New are brass instruments and a modern guitar sound. All in all, a new and unexpected direction for Grown Below’s sound.

The Other Sight continues the story of The Long Now, taking the protagonist to live in a cave of mirrors. His descent into madness drives him to suicide after realizing he is alone and everyone around him are mere “Phantoms” of his own reflection.

A dark story for a dark album. Are the songs up to the challenge? “New Throne” starts us off pensive, growing in power and arrogance and introduces a couple new tricks in Grown Below’s toolbox. The song commences with the heavy riffs we’d expect and meanders through atmospheric interludes before ending with horn and trumpet and a bit of high, fast guitar previously unheard from the band.

“My Triumph” continues the pensive mood and incorporates some heavier doom elements. Coming in at thirteen minutes, this song provides ample opportunity for a complete sludge song.

With “Phantoms”, we are taken in a completely new and surprising direction. Reminiscent of old God Smack, this song might — dare I say it — be suitable for some airplay. I could definitely hear this song on WAAF in Boston or KUPD in Phoenix. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing pop about the sound. It’s just more accessible than the rest, and may be the best song on the album, showcasing Vanstaen’s vocal talent to the fullest.

With it’s slow build to a straight-out doom payoff, “Reverie” gives us ten minutes of everything Grown Below does well wrapped in a fascinating story. Passionate singing, interesting interludes and heavy guitars. If I could define the band with one song, it would be this one.

The Other Sight isn’t the album Grown Below fans expect, but it is most definitely the album Doom Metal needs. I highly recommend it to fans of doom and sludge that want something more than forty-five-minutes of plodding, repetitive riffs and indecipherable growling. For those who simply love good music, and don’t care about the genre, this album is sure to deliver something different for your music collection.

Doom is moving in new and refreshing directions. Can it escape the shadows, moving into the fore?

If you are into slow, dark, deep, silent atmospheric but heavy music and that, in combination with terms like sludge and postrock, doesn’t give you feverish shivers, then there are two Belgium bands you should check, both have a new record out: Musth and Grown Below.

The trouble I have with these kind of bands is that I have to drag myself through their records: dragging, monotonous sludge/post-rock music doesn’t suit me very well. This does not mean that their music sucks and that ‘The Other Sight’ by Grown Below is automatically a bad album. On the contrary, even I must admit that the beauty and the greatness of the album lies in the silence combined with the heavy outbursts, the dark atmosphere, the theme, … the whole package actually.

Thematically ‘The Other Sight’ begins its journey where their previous album ‘The Long Now’ ended. So if you want to enjoy this album and Grown Below to the fullest, you should pick up both albums.

Belgian Sludge lords Grown Below have returned with their sophomore full length album!

Entitled The Other Sight and released through Slow Burn Records this new opus follows up the bands debut offering from 2011, The Long Now. Kicking things off with New Throne and you are instantly met by reverb and fuzz before a chugging, groove laden melody moves forward at a meticulous speed. Scorching raw vocals combine well with the bands more winding, melodic nature and grinding, abrasive riffs. With a lyrical concept behind the band of the end of days, life’s end and in particular all time coming to an end, there is a suitably morose ambiance about the music that Grown Below create, often portrayed through moments of still calm, softer acoustic tones and the gentle twang of bass or solitary snare beat! Even the odd cleaner set of pipes assail you with more haunting, pleading tones.

The Other Sight is a nice contrast of textures and depths, on one hand a savage doomed sledge hammer blow of crippling intensity, the next a more atmospheric, soaring ambiance and finally a calm before the storm. At all times played with a methodical care to create a diverse and exciting album!

I am a great fan of this Belgian band’s previous work “The Long Now” (2011). Its devastating swathes of sludgy sadness are just part of a electrifying progression. Like a book you don’t want to put down, the ever-changing moods just make it impossible to escape, not that you’d want to.

On the face of it, this one again comprises four massive chunks of between eight and around thirteen minutes, plus a couple of other bits. The opener “New Throne” starts in an unfamiliarly aggressive tone, but about half way through as I was getting used to this fiery post metal, delicate strings enter the scene and we’re gazing melancholically at eternity. Skilfully the build up becomes ever more epic and tense. The vocalist’s tone is agonising. It’s goosebumps time. Oddly, I thought that this track could have attacked our nerve ends for more than its allotted eight minute fifty seconds, but there’s no hanging around as “My Triumph” starts with a captivating drum beat. Again the echoing guitar ring has a sense of distance and isolation about it. The vocalist matches its beauty with a haunting tone. A truly magnificent guitar line follows, accompanied by the hypnotic beat of the drum. It’s too dynamic to be called doom but it has the doom genre’s deadly and sinister tone about it. The instrumental work is awesome but yet it was as if this ever-increasing violence is drilling its way into my brain. But I think it’s the quieter passages which create the most impact and with thirteen minutes to play with, “My Triumph” slows down into subtle reflectiveness, emerging in the sea of irrepressible sadness in which Grown Below excels.

Of course there are post metal bands, most notably Cult of Luna, Neurosis and Isis, who know how to create massive atmospheres, but I think what makes Grown Below different is that the world that they convey is somehow human if sad, and maybe more real. This impression may be due to the vocals, which can be haunting, melancholic or growled, and the intricately detailed and personal guitar work in the quiet moments. The ambiance is reminiscent of Netra’s “Sørbyen”. “My Triumph” ends violently, suggesting that all is not well with the world. After the three minute experimental melancholic piece “Valo Etendi”, which reminded me of a gun fight going on in the distance, there is a deathly quiet. A cosmic sound accompanies gentle guitar strains. It’s minimalist but with it comes a sense of foreboding. The drum pumps out a steady heart beat. The vocal line portrays gloom and vulnerability. This is “Phantoms”. The steadily progressing guitar reinforces the sense of loneliness. The clouds inevitably darken. The vocalist screams in pain as the guitar takes us to the top of the clouds and to majestic heights. “Reveries” follows the pattern of starting with haunting gloom before, perhaps predictably, exploding in a maelstrom of doom-laden and horrifying violence. This is Grown Below at their darkest. The album then fades away with a grey ninety second track “Malvarma”, whose origins are the cosmos.

Like its predecessor, “The Other Sight” has some breathtaking sections along with more recognisable bursts of post metal. It can be equally delicate and violent. There is great balance. Sophisticated, constantly evolving and always intensely atmospheric, it is once more like that book you don’t want to put down.

Don’t remember of another Slow Burn release I have enjoyed as much as I did the second album from this Belgian quartet. Perfectly melting Sludge, Doom amd Post Metal elements Grown Below’s music will appeal to a large category of listeners. 6 tracks totaling 45 minutes, an awesome journey through the different atmospheres portrayed by these guys, and ranging from calm and serene to mad and chaotic ones. The band’s technical abilities are way above average and that allows them to avoid repetitive and uninteresting constructions, everything on this CD seems done according to a well crafted plan in order to involve the listener more and more. An excellent album I’d recommend to both old-schoolers and fand of more modern Metal. I’ve spinned it already 5 times, don’t think I ever spinned a Post Metal record that much before…

Of all of the releases Slow Burn, the post-rock division of Solitude Records, has put out, Grown Below might be the best one to date. The label describe their work as doom or sludge metal, but honestly I do not hear the doom element here. The songs of this band are comprised of noisy, whacked out hardcore riffs accompanied by screamo vocals, and clean guitar parts with “normal”, albeit melancholic singing. As you can imagine, there is a lot of alteration, switching back and forth, between angry mood swings to calm, drifting moments, which is as banal as it gets for this music, but there is a catchiness and beauty to The Other Sight that belies and surpasses these tired conventions. The bass guitar has a tendency to drift off and lead a life of its own, while the clean guitars swell over everything like waves of cold air flowing through a barren steppe. The songs are undeniably atmospheric when they choose to let go of the anger. When they do move into the angry territory, they lose that, but not necessarily to the detriment of the songs as a whole. There is some bizarre exchange between the drums and the guitars in the first track around the 2 minute mark that threw me off, sounding as if the CD is skipping, which was no doubt intentional. This noisy, mash-up of hardcore and post-metal riffs and vocals is absolutely not my thing at all, but I think an entire release of just the clean passages would have been quite great, if not excellent. The best material is concentrated in the first half of the album, but nevertheless a strong release for Slow Burn.

Lately I have been growing a little bit tired of releases from “Solitude Productions”, because they were becoming terribly similar to each other. This second disk of Belgian band Grown Below, released by sub-label “Slow Burn Records”, seemed quite different and woke me from a somewhat sleepy mood.
Actually, I don’t know what tags should be added to this band or album. The music varies from Post-Rock to Sludge and Doom Metal. The atmosphere is quite calm, and has quite a positive effect on the nervous system. There are moments where angry Sludge spice emerges and it does not do anything too bad. The blending of calmness and strictness reminds me of the Swedish band Forest of Shadows, though the latter were more metallic, while these Belgians are more… contemporary? Yes, the entire atmosphere, diving through the depths of Post- genres makes the band a victim of modern tides. It is not bad, but all in all – quite unoriginal and uninteresting. However, it sounds rather pleasant. Maybe because it resonates well with tonight’s calm rhythm. Though one should not be mistaken – while it sounds pleasant, “The Other Sight” drowns in the mire of today’s Post-Hardcore/Sludge/Doom/Post-Rock genres and it does not benefit the band at all. This disk is not really to my liking, though it goes well along with night’s mood. On the other hand, it is quite far from anything original.